


On the Road

by smokingtiger



Category: DBSK | Tohoshinki | TVfXQ | TVXQ
Genre: M/M, bit of a celestial vibe if you will, reader shall see what i mean in due time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:35:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22037155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smokingtiger/pseuds/smokingtiger
Summary: Changmin kicks off turf sticking to his shoes and removes a blade of long golden grass from within his hair, groaning all the while as he decides to take a seat on a wooden bench outside the motel entrance.Something is very wrong, because every face he had come across belongs to a neighbor he never talks to, or a work associate he doesn’t know the name of.The more time he allows himself to reflect, the more he is aware of a force veiling his heart that gently but persistently hushes the panic attempting to swell and make itself known throughout his body.(Loosely based off of the setting in TVXQ [Tohoshinki]'s MV "Road")
Relationships: Jung Yunho/Shim Changmin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	On the Road

Changmin stirs awake from having dozed off in his seat on the bus as its lone passenger, rubbing away the sleep in his eyes as he places his messenger bag on the unoccupied seat beside him.   
It takes him a moment to card through his memories and remember where he is-- his hands occupied with fixing his hair and combing through flat spots where he placed his head against the window during his nap. Changmin looks to his reflection in the glass for a moment before focusing outwards to watch passing trees and fields of long grass and wonders how long he’d slept for when the last thing he recalls is riding past the Han River back home. 

With no one else on board aside from the reticent driver at the wheel, the low putter of the engine and creaking of bus seat springs are the man’s only tethers to remaining in present mind. He watches in silence as spots of sunlight through tree branches pass over the sleeves of his shirt and shadows of leaves cling to the ceilings and walls of the bus interior before disappearing behind the vehicle’s back exit.   
There is a sense of calm that veils over his eyes, and it is not long when eventually the trees and grass begin to slow down outside his window. Changmin is moved to bob his head forward when the tour bus gradually slows to a stop at what seems to be at a station he hadn’t noticed approaching at all.

“Last stop on my route,” the bus driver releases his hands off the wheel and rolls his hands about his wrists in a stretch. 

Changmin is nearly startled to hear the man speak at all, embarrassed to have assumed his driver would just stay mute throughout the entirety of the trip. “Thank you for a safe ride,” he pipes up, and promptly grabs his bag to stand and exit the vehicle. “The countryside here is beautiful. Where are we exactly?” 

“Not far off the coast towards the Yellow Sea,” the driver nods towards the outdoor bulletin board at the front of the station outside. He tips his uniform hat in goodbye without sparing so much as a glance, and promptly shuts the bus door the moment his passenger steps off. 

Changmin finds the man’s response to be less than helpful (the entire west coast is bordered with aquatic life of the Yellow Sea), and mutters to himself “safe travels” with a sigh as he watches the tour bus chug on down the abandoned, quiet road. 

There is a gust of wind that rattles the very trees that surround the station and brings with it a blanket of chattering leaves obscuring the view of the bus before him.   
Changmin brushes a leaf off of his nose and sneezes from carried dust, soon opening his eyes to find that it has departed and gone completely out of view. 

Almost as if the vehicle had so suddenly disappeared with the leaves in the wind. 

An unfathomable occurrence beyond reason. 

Though strangely, Changmin simply nods at the absurdity and hums a note to pair the singing of hidden birds in the trees.

His questions, he decides, will have to wait for someone who can answer them. 

With that, Changmin steps over and wipes the dust off of the bus directory glass at the edge of the station with the sleeve of his flannel shirt.   
He can’t seem to make out the language it is in, and even a list of what he assumes to be departure and arrival times have no predictable or comprehensible format to them. Every time he blinks his eyes, it’s as if the colored lines of available routes change course, and many of them often extend to unknown territories off the map--blurred by splotches of ink faded away with age and rain damage at the edges of the paper sealed within the wooden frame. 

He steps back, scuffing the soles of his shoes on gravel as he digs out his phone from within his back pocket. 

Of course, as is expected of a rural place, there wasn’t any available signal at all. 

“Guess I’m walking,” he tilts his head in defeat and grabs a map from the guest wall of the suspiciously abandoned service office filled with silence and settled dust. 

Changmin adjusts the shoulder strap of his messenger bag and checks his shoelaces before he starts his tread. 

He predicts it’s going to be a very long, long day. 

* * *

Deft fingers skim over fresh printer ink as a pair of careful eyes take in the headshot photo of the assignment file. The human in question is a young man with dyed dark brown hair and a well-kept record of three decades of life during his time in South Korea. Bright, round eyes filled with depth in compassion and a childlike curiosity for knowledge stare back up at Yunho, and he cannot help but sigh in disappointment that a life had wound up in this situation so soon. 

The angel shifts his weight from one leg to the other, then leans onto the wall behind him.

According to records, Shim Changmin had been a quiet case to watch over since his very beginning. He was an intelligent person with younger sisters whom he cared for deeply, parents he’d respected in full, and friends that he held onto dearly. There had been no major incidents Changmin needed saving from that a quick miracle in the world could not fix. As far as Yunho was concerned, the majority of those scenarios could very easily be chalked up as ‘luck’ by human standards. Shim Changmin did his very best to lead an ordinary, honest life. 

It was quite earnest as much as it was humble. 

Yunho looks through the file photographs--‘memories,’ as mortals would call them, that had been taken through the human’s eyes. He finds the ones Changmin had chosen to keep on file all range from various moments of growth throughout his life, ranging from family trips as a child to high school embarrassments, and on. 

Suddenly, there is a thud to the right. 

Yunho does not startle at the sound of a hollow slap on top of the water cooler. 

“Long mission?” he asks, flipping through a stapled packet of pages in his hands. 

“Humans,” Heechul mutters, and lifts his styrofoam cup to his lips. The man looks off into the distance, which was not nearly far enough for him to feel exactly contemplative. He settles for focusing on finding an image on a cream-colored popcorn texture wall to distract himself from his excruciatingly long shift.   
“Their history just keeps getting crazier as time passes,” Heechul breaks his gaze from the outline of a seismograph’s artistic interpretation of a penguin on the wall and flips through the binder that had been tucked under his arm. He lets slide down Yunho’s papers a photo of a man in an oversized suit quickly tucking an envelope into his blazer breast pocket.   
“They don’t have much sense despite being an intelligent species, do they?”   
Yunho sighs and returns the photo, giving his coworker a look of sympathy. “Conspiring for money under the table is one of the worst in the books, but I suppose the temptation demands repetition despite the chance of one being caught.”

Heechul quirks a brow. “Conspiring? I was talking about the man’s horrendous tie.” 

There is a considerate pause.   
“His jacket isn’t very well-fitted either,” Yunho comments.

“That too,” Heechul agrees.

It’s then that something chirps at Yunho from within his pant pocket and his coworker frowns at the noise. “What, do you have your assignment already? We haven’t been able to hang out in ages, Yurobbong. You’re always in and out of here like the wind!” Heechul is near whining as he follows the man to a long, off-white wall with multiple elevator doors along it. 

“I’ll call you when I get back,” Yunho half-laughs and steps onto a particular tile on the floor in front of the elevator until “1004” lights up above the car door. “Can’t be helped that there’s much to do during the era of humans,” he provides, adjusting the suspenders over his shoulders. 

“Right. Our work with them has always been on a trend of increase,” Heechul looks over his friend’s face once and blinks with furrowed brows. “And, Yunho.”

Yunho turns his head to the other, lips pressed firm into a straight line in surprise he wasn’t called a silly on-trend nickname Heechul would come up with. “Hmm?” 

“You’ll take good care of the soul. Don’t worry.”

With that, Heechul sends him off with a fond wave, and at closed double doors Yunho is greeted with a soft light transforming the elevator interior coloration from steely gray to a shimmering white. 

“ **Hello** ,” the ‘light’ says, radiating a gentle warmth. It gradually relaxes Yunho further into pure contentment in its presence as his clothing changes from his regular office wear into his on-field uniform. “ **Have you any further questions regarding your assignment?** ” 

Yunho adjusts the cuffs of what appears to be jean jacket sleeves before picking up his backpack that had appeared by his feet out of thin air. “I have none,” he responds with an almost mutter, and slings one strap over his shoulder.

“ **And what of concerns?** ” the ‘voice’ chimes, lights now glimmering along the ceiling. 

“He’s young,” Yunho slowly tilts his head to the side in thought. “I would have liked to see his empathy be more present in the world as it is today.” 

Glowing gold travels through waves all throughout the perimeter like a river, deliberately gathering about the enclosure’s vertices as if in thought.   
“ **As it truly does need,** ” ‘warmth’ agrees. 

“Should anything occur, I will be in contact.” 

“ **So you shall,** ” answers Elevator Voice, pausing momentarily before speaking again.   
“ **You best hurry and find him. He’s just about fully woken,** ” the ‘light’ gives a wave of comfort and encouragement to the angel that pulses into his being, and ‘it’ vanishes entirely as the doors part to allow him entry onto his field. 

* * *

Something is very wrong. 

A bespectacled man with binoculars looking at native birds within the forest told him they were at the outskirts of Gwangju.   
A fieldworker upon bright green knolls responded they were along the coast of Busan.   
The woman tending to a small motel near the quiet farmers’ market went on to console him saying they were located in Incheon. 

Changmin kicks off turf sticking to his shoes and removes a blade of long golden grass from within his hair, groaning all the while as he decides to take a seat on a wooden bench outside the motel entrance. 

Something is very wrong, because every face he had come across belongs to a neighbor he never talks to, or a work associate he doesn’t know the name of. 

The more time he allows himself to reflect, the more he is aware of a force veiling his heart that gently but persistently hushes the panic attempting to swell and make itself known throughout his body. 

Changmin rests his elbows upon his knees and hangs his head as he exhales, raking both hands through his hair as the fog occupying his headspace slowly continues to dissipate. 

He needed to get out of here. A vacation to the countryside he assumed he needed to shake off the stress from his work life in revenue management and breakup with his ex-fiancee was a terrible idea.   
What he needed, he concludes, was a change of surroundings. A city or at least a modern town with more people pouring in and out of buildings with phones and at the very least 3G internet access would surely have the information he needs to gain peace of mind. 

“Transportation,” Changmin mumbles, rummaging through his backpack for the umpteenth time that afternoon. 

He was going to understand the damned bus and train routes or keel over trying. 

* * *

A thin layer of dust had settled on everything within the room.   
Yunho supposes that he is at what seems to be an abandoned train station. In front of it is an unoccupied platform outside the window with paint chipping off some wooden planks and what he believes are termed ‘utility poles’ connected together even further past the visible train tracks. 

With all his time to and from the human realm, Yunho had spent a significant amount of it appreciating the limitations of the physical world and every detailed thing needing care or maintenance lest it turn into a mess in one way or another.   
Endeared by some memories of observing television commercials for cleaning supplies, he snaps his fingers to eliminate all traces of dust and cobwebs, and waves his unoccupied hand in the air to turn on every ceiling light in the building. As much as the angel was proud of the research in reproducing such accurate likeness of the physical world, the assignment of tending to the soul under his care left him focused enough to immediately head out of the side door and summon his automobile onto an old, trodden road. 

One flash of light later, his woodie jalopy chirps at him with a happy honk of greeting. Yunho hurries down the wooden steps of the station office and pats the hood of the vehicle to breathe life into its engine with a fond grin. Soon, he is on his way to find a “Shim Changmin” roaming about the landscape, and Yunho reaches for a pair of sunglasses from the car interior compartment just above his rear view mirror. 

The angel remembers this time to put on his seat belt, worried he may startle yet another human about his lack of safety behind the wheel. There really was no need for seat belts when one is not on the Earth planet (or on any planet, for that matter), but his cases are never immediately aware of where they are when upon the road to the afterlife.   
“Need to remember the human tendencies,” Yunho mutters to himself as a side note, then clicks on the radio of the car dashboard. 

An infomercial jingle reaches its end, and a voice clears itself within transition. “ _A wooden jalopy, really?_ ” the commercial female voice asks from within the singing box. “ _Not exactly the most fun model._ ” 

Yunho hums his condolences, drumming his fingers over the steering wheel. “I’d say this is more comfortable than when you were assigned as a motorcycle the last time, no?”

The tuning dial spins from beneath an air vent until it lands on the voice of an older man and interrupts his show hosting to borrow lips and words. “ _So says the one who forgot to pull down the kickstand,_ ” the vehicle grumbles.   
The angel waves his hand by the wheel in dismissal. “I’ll apologize as many times as you think necessary, but really. The person was panicking after fully waking upon this plane, and luckily you are not one to feel any pains or require any maintenance.”

A brief silence. 

“ _The very worst was when I was a carriage._ ” 

Yunho sighs at the memory. “Right. The horses were not the kindest to your wheels.” 

* * *

Changmin rubs at his face and massage his eyelids with the palms of his hands, tired and oblivious to the footsteps upon a dusty road leisurely approaching him. 

“Here you go, son. I can’t stand to see a young man like you look so haggard,” an elderly woman with permed hair and a colorful visor slides over a tray of peeled pear slices beside him. “From the market stall I run with my husband.”

Changmin startles at the voice and clammers to stand from his seat at the bench.   
“Oh; I’m sorry-- is that supposed to be for me? I must really look like a sorry mess right now,” the man stammers, embarrassed to be caught off-guard and taking longer than necessary to locate his wallet somewhere on his person. The aunty who looks an awful lot like the quiet owner of a restaurant Changmin frequents during his workday lunch breaks tuts disapprovingly and waves her gloved hands to order he sit down again once she understood his movements.   
“Raised so politely, but I will have none of it,” she gestures at the fruit on the plastic tray. “Just eat and don’t mind the things that bother you during the time you chew. Tall ones like you need a lot of nourishment, if I’ve learned anything about my sons.” 

I thought rice cake soup lady only had a daughter, Changmin thinks. The crunch from the sweetest pear he’s ever tasted in his existence is too distracting to form much thought thereafter. 

Though a provider of snacks, the woman was unable to provide Changmin information on how to figure out what any of the numbers or ‘times’ meant on the train and bus schedules he’d clung onto for dear life.   
“There aren’t many buses and trains that pass through the area when it’s such a sleepy community, you know,” she murmurs, flipping the map upside down before handing it back to the young man in defeat. 

The exhaust is very apparent on Changmin’s face. 

Aunty Pear adjusts the cuffs of her floral pattern sleeves to reach up and pat the man’s shoulder, but she halts in realization of something brilliant, or perhaps desperate.   
Changmin thinks to himself she looks like a radio antenna finally finding a station.

“Are you feeling all right--”

She claps her hands together with a smile. “Hitchhiking sounds like a fine option, doesn’t it? Get lucky enough and there’ll be a car or two driving by any day now.” 

Changmin desperately wishes he could will himself to feel upset. 

Aunty Pear is too much a ray of optimism for him to even begin trying. 

* * *

Yunho taps his communicator off and tucks the celestial device back into his work bag.   
“That should do it. Changmin should stay put where he is.” 

The car’s radio dial clicks on once more. “ _Why do you suppose he’s conjured his ‘path’ to be in the middle of nowhere?_ ” the jalopy asks through a traffic reporter’s voice. “ _Scenic, but inconvenient, if you ask me._ ”

Yunho lets go of the steering wheel to allow the vehicle they drive as they’d like. He retrieves his human’s folder and unclips Changmin’s profile photo to show the dashboard of the car. “Shim Changmin, South Korean. Early 30’s and in revenue management for an electronics company.”   
“ _He’s quite young, poor thing,_ ” Jalopy says over the instrumental of a ballad song.   
“My guess is he’s wanted a vacation for quite some time and manifested this countryside for an escape to something more relaxing,” the angel provides. “He’s a hard worker in his field and a good hearted person.” 

Jalopy presses down on the acceleration and flips up its windshield wipers. “ _Finally, a change of pace from the others we’ve met. I’ll make sure we reach him soon._ ” 

Yunho grips onto the steering wheel for leverage and thanks Yunho from a moment ago for remembering his seat belt. 

**Author's Note:**

> Being able to write during a little time off is always a treat ^^ Thank you for taking the time to read and join me on my random mental excursions. -J


End file.
